the imams followed who prohibits it more emphatically than he and his followers do. Indeed, according to him, if a man specifies a future time for divorce, it takes effect immediately, lest the marriage become temporary, like a temporary marriage contract.

More outrageous still, in their lands they attribute to Mālik the view that sodomy is lawful. When this is mentioned to a leading authority in his school, he replies, “The Quran indicates that it is forbidden.” Yet they cannot bring themselves to declare the report false and say, “This is forbidden by consensus.” A knowledgeable scholar, however, knows that it is forbidden by the consensus of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Magians, and Sabians, and by most polytheists. None have regarded it as lawful except the people of Lot and certain heretics belonging to the other communities. Because these people and others like them do not know how to distinguish matters established by knowledge and certainty from matters open to independent juristic reasoning, they have become confused. Thus, they cannot recognize that most matters on which fatwas are issued are established with certainty, even though they are definitive matters of religion known to those versed in it.

In reality, however, these people are not scholars with understanding of the religion. Rather, they merely transmit the statements and school of a particular scholar. True understanding of the religion requires understanding the proofs of the revealed law, with their established transmitted evidence from the Quran, the Sunnah, and consensus, both through explicit statements and through inference.

But those speculative theologians understood jurisprudence to consist of questions concerning